The «Zero Point» statement

Among Open Source developers, there is a known massive rejection of
political interaction. Mostly, this rejection is supported with the
words «You can't change anything anyway» and «They
don't listen to the small people».

The campaign against software patents, which started way back in 1998,
does however constitute a major hint that this assertion simply doesn't
hold. In this campaign, FFII has successfully turned down several
attempts to introduce US style patent law in Europe, and is currently
on its way to create its own directive proposal. This proposal will
constitute a major step towards a new era of intellectual property
rights which tries to achieve more dynamic protection of rights which
is adaptable to the requirements of both the inventors and the
consumers.

Necessity for Open Source lobbyists

So Lobbying can be worthwhile. Still, the question remains why we
should participate in lobbying as such.

The problem is that the IT market isn't quite as apparent as the so-called
«real world». In fact, most of the parliamentarians aren't
very clued when it comes to information technology, even less about
information security, which is a big topic as well. This makes it easy
for professional lobbyists working for big corporations to educate
the parliamentarians about the things that they consider reasonable to
know. This again makes the parliamentarians much more likely to make
favorable legislation for big corporations.

However, the small and medium sized enterprises and the Open Source
community don't have a lobby of their own. This means that in a lot
of occasions, the parliamentarians aren't going to hear about the
arguments that this group is bringing across, even though in a lot
of cases they are logically and economically superior.

However, everybody who is working as a lobbyist at least half of his
spare time will already cause a great relief to the problem. If you
talk to your parliamentarians and provide them with good arguments
to support your point, we are already one step closer to building a
world that we would actually want to live in. Parliamentarians tend
to listen to good arguments rather than bribes or harassment, which
is a major handicap to the big industry.

If we combine our forces, we can win a whole lot of further debates and
make this world a friendlier place to small players and Open Source.

Why lobbying at all

Some people, however, consider lobbying in itself to be the evil it is
trying to solve. We from FFII believe that this is not the case.
In our opinion, lobbying isn't just a model of influencing people's
opinion, it is more than that: it's a solution to a particular problem,
which was created by the parliamentary democracy itself.

The problem is that laws exist for the vast majority of things we
encounter in our lifes. However, nobody can be expected to be able
to judge every aspect of our daily life, simply because he doesn't have
the expertise to do so. This is especially true here in Switzerland,
as we have a parliament of volunteers.

The solution Lobbying provides is that there is a set of established
experts on all the areas that will be covered by legislation. These
experts can be asked for their opinion and for amendments to the
current legislation, and will also contact the parliamentarians with
suggestions and motions. These experts are called «lobbyists»
and are supposed to ensure that sensible legislation is passed.

The problem we're facing these days is, in our opinion, that the
distribution of lobbyists is rather unilateral. Large corporations
can afford to pay dedicated lobbyists to lobby the parliaments, while
most of the small businesses and private producers have ceased to
lobby their parliamentarians themselves long ago. There is however
a need for opinions from smaller businesses, because they actually
still make up the vast majority of the market, as has been shown in
the Economic Majority
campaign. So in order to be representative, it would be necessary
to have their opinion as well. This idea is called «grassroot
lobbying» because it starts from the root of industrial growth.

The big corporations have also discovered that there is ineed a demand
for opinions from small companies. However, since there isn't much
action to be expected from the small business side, they invented small
businesses which they send to parliament in order to simulate grassroot
lobbying. This process is called «astroturfing», because
like with astroturf, it looks like grass roots, but there is no real
development taking place.

The easiest way to eliminate astroturfing is to get more small business
lobbyists into the parliaments. If the parliamentarians get to know the
small businesses better. they learn to differenciate between a real
IT business and a fake one. This step will bring us a big step further
ahead, which means one step closer to an open source society.

However, no matter if lobbying is expertise or evil, we have to put up
with the fact that lobbying exists in its current shape. So the
discussion whether there should be lobbying or not is actually
irrelevant, since the other side of the debate does very heavy lobbying
already, and all we can currently do to improve our position is to
provide information and arguments from our side.

Thus our suggestion is that we spare the debate on whether lobbying is
a good idea or not for later, and get to support our aims in the way
that we're given at this time.

How to help

There are a whole lot of different ways in which you can support the
aims of FFII (and as such, the aims of the Open Source community and
the small and medium sized IT businesses). You can read more about
this subject in the article «How to
support FFII».